The heads are rolling at AOL over the recent search engine data clusterfuck (see here, here, here and here).
CTO Maureen Govern and two other employees are now history. John McKinley, AOL’s former CTO, will take over on an interim basis. See here and John Paczkowski for more.
From my discussion with Andrew Weinstein, the AOL spokesperson who apologized on behalf of AOL after the data dump, my understanding is that this entire event was caused by a single clueless researcher and a complete lack of oversight by his managers. Hopefully these firings are tied to the actual people responsible and not just for the sake of holding someone, anyone, responsible.
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Have you seen the http://evaal.com search engine? It looks like a Google Killer
Oh yeah, definitely Google-killer there. I expect Google will be dead in a few days. No Spam Comments!
“clusterfuck” Yeah, that’s good news-reporting grammar.
But it was the perfect word to describe the situation.
Ted why do you sound sarcastic, are you one of those who believe Google is God? Well this is the internet and things do change overnight sometimes
In the past weeks, AOL has had many unhappy customers. AOL remember without your customers you would not be on line so long. AOL clean up your act before it is too late. If you don’t have customers, then you don’t have profits. To AOL and other big dogs, keep us happy or we will go elsewhere for trustworthy services.
~Concerned Customer
Well, do people really use AOL for search? Long ago I used to use Yahoo!, then AltaVista, even Hotbot, and eventually, 70% of the time Google, 25% of the time Yahoo! and 5% of the time MSN. Never AOL.
Amrit Hallan,
What about a search engine such as evaal that shares revenue with Users and by introducing the human factor increase search efficiency by more than half
Evaal is awesome. I have seen “the promise land of search.”
http://evaal.com/tour/evaal.html
Google is history! Web 2.0 search is here!
“From my discussion with Andrew Weinstein, the AOL spokesperson who apologized on behalf of AOL after the data dump, my understanding is that this entire event was caused by a single clueless researcher and a complete lack of oversight by his managers.”
I’ve heard another version. Erik Selberg (from MSN search) talked to some of the AOL researchers at SIGIR and has said:
“you had better believe they had a reasonable amount of sign-off from people inside of AOL”
http://www.selberg.org/2006/08.....ntroversy/
Mike, can you please ban this timothy guy or something?
Timothy: How can I sign up to be an expert on the subject of building poor websites and spamming online communities for lack of decent marketing ideas? Hopefully you’ll search for that and I can give you some “advice.”
Gee, I didn’t expect the Technorati Tag “clusterfuck” to be so popular
AOL is in bad shape. They are a PR nightmare and their service is terrible
btw
evaal
sux
OK everyone… time to googlebomb aol.com with the term “clusterfuck”
People still want google. They just want it without the privacy invading user tracking scam. If you could have that for free then why not? Try this one.
Theres only like 20 search proxies out there but this one is just simple.
http://www.blackboxsearch.com
Nice language…..
What AOL did was a disgrace. Its good to see some internal changes.
Timothy, if your site looks like a Google killer, why hasn’t it been featured on techcrunch?. “If it ain’t been techcrunched, it ain’t worth using”. With regard to your site I’ve only ever seen it on here as spam comments.
“PR nightmare”. I’d agree with that. It should have been Andrew Weinstein that got canned.
This is terribly WRONG to fire people over this incident
Sure, that data should have been password/ log-in protected……BUT, this situation itself, is an abberation!
How often does this ocurr?????
The players involved ARE qualified - or else, they would NOT have been hired, in this very competative market.
The players are SKILLED or else they would not have held their jobs!
People CAN learn from mistakes, or communication breakdowns, especially when the circumstances -themselves - are very unusual.
Ironically, having learned from this episode would probably have made everyone involved more capable as employees.
This IS obviously a Public Relations (scapegoat) ploy………….come now, are the new hirees going to be MORE qualified or skilled than those terminated.
Checks will be put in place, so that even those EQUALLY qualified replacements will never have the opportunity of make THOSE mistakes……but, statistically they have the same liklihood of making others, where loopholes exist.
But somebody did not do their job proper.That is how the data was released.
Let’s hope that they got fired because they deserve it, and not only as a way for AOL to get some of its reputation back, for dealing so strictly with privacy violations.
Do people still use aol? That’s sad. Maybe this little episode will help people realize this.
This was bound to happen. With so much bad press that AOL got, they had to do something to negate that. Though firing the CTO might not help much, it could just calm the normal user that AOL takes data breaches seriously.
It thought it was a problem with their own system? Anyhow.. fire some people is not a solution, it makes them only weaker.